Hot Dinners is headed up by the brother and sister team of Catherine & Gavin Hanly who, quite simply, love eating out

We think London’s restaurants are among the most exciting in the world and we hope that we demonstrate that kind of enthusiasm in the way we, and all our writers, write. Many of London’s restaurant websites were set up either to sell tables or push corporate entertainment venues. We’re just here to give our readers a bit of insider knowledge on what’s happening on the London food scene – to be the place where they can discover, at a glance, what Britain’s most respected food critics think of a restaurant and find out where the next great place to eat might be.

The hottest restaurants

To make it easier for you to find out which restaurants are worth going to and are creating the biggest buzz, we will only feature restaurants that have at least two reviews from respected critics or sources. This way, we make it much quicker and easier to find out where's really hot when it comes to London restaurants. We link to reviews from a number of respected resources, and if you think your site should be included in those, just let us know.

We'll make sure you're kept up-to-date on all the restaurant news that's worth knowing in our Gastroblog, taking the best stories from print or on the Internet and also featuring our own exclusives. And if you want to know where the next hot restaurants will be, keep an eye on our New and upcoming hot restaurants section for the latest news on new openings, soft launches and more.

Exclusive features and interviews

In our features section, we'll be talking to the top chefs in London, finding out everything from their favourite places to eat, upcoming trends, how they run their restaurants and more.

The Hot Dinners newsletter goes out every week to more than 18,000 food-lovers. Our subscriber list ranges from PAs of CEOs in blue chip companies to chefs, bloggers, journalists and people who just love knowing where to eat out in London. Find out how you can advertise on it.

Hot Dinners brings together London restaurant reviews from all the key critics, aiming to show you at a glance how a restaurant has fared critically through an average score. Now, as you may have already noticed, not all reviewers use the same scoring method. Indeed, some critics don't even use a score at all when reviewing a restaurant, which did present us with something of an issue when coming up with an average rating. So how do we work out individual scores for Hot Dinners in these instances?

Here's how it breaks down.

Exact scoring: if a reviewer scores a restaurant out of 10, we use that

Relative scoring: if a reviewer scores out of something either than 10 - we simply calculate it up to an X out of 10 score.

Average scoring: If a reviewer scores various elements of a dining experience, but doesn't give an overall rating - we simply work out the average.

Estimated scoring: This is the most difficult score to switch to our ratings. If a reviewer doesn't give a score at all, we read through the review and assign a score to it. This score is estimated based on the content of the review, the writer's other reviews for benchmarking and how the review compares to other scored reviews. It's not an exact science - but we do our best with the material we have to work with.

If you don't agree with any of our estimated scores, please let us know - we're certainly receptive to a well-made argument.